Review/Pop; A Little Hate Music, Please

By JON PARELES

Published: February 24, 1990

When Andrew Dice Clay called himself ''the most vulgar, vicious comic ever to walk the face of the earth,'' as he did on stage Thursday night at Madison Square Garden, he left out two other adjectives: juvenile and calculating. Mr. Clay has devised a public persona - call it Everylout - that carries male high-school humor, bawdy and bullying, to the world outside the locker room. In the process, and probably not inadvertently, it exploits the tensions that are arising as white heterosexual males find that the days of unquestioned dominance are over.

Mr. Clay may well be the most popular standup comic of the moment. His two Madison Square Garden shows were sold out, and were being filmed for a documentary; as at stadium rock shows, the stage action was projected on video screens. His performance was introduced by a coming-attractions trailer for a detective comedy starring Mr. Clay, to be released in June.

He presents himself as a swaggering tough guy, wearing a rhinestoned leather jacket that says ''Dice Rules'' and ceremoniously smoking cigarette after cigarette. In his routine, delivered in a Brooklyn accent and punctuated by grunts, Mr. Clay is the ultimate male-chauvinist pig -boasting about every sexual exploit, hostile to any needs but his own. And while he tolerates women as providers of sex, cooking and cleaning, his hostility extends to just about any other group he can identify. ''I pick on everything,'' he boasts.

He's a caricature of macho insensitivity; when his bedmate gets upset that he doesn't care about her, he groans and says: ''Honey, stop crying. What's your name?'' Like a stereotypical 1950's biker adrift in the present, he's got no use for sexual equality: ''Until about six years ago, women didn't even know they were supposed to feel good,'' he says, drawing shouts and applause.

Mr. Clay is lewd and proud, reveling (a la other ribald comics, particularly the pretelevision Redd Foxx) in the sounds and smells and textures of genitalia. His crowd-pleasing specialty is to give Mother Goose rhymes scatological endings, and the audience shouts along with ones that are familiar from his album and his Home Box Office programs.

Where Mr. Clay's recorded routines trotted out ethnic stereotypes, he now only dabbles in a few anti-Japanese jokes. This year, he's picking on hunchbacks, midgets, stutterers and old women with walkers; he mimes kicking them out of his way. While some of those jokes are so exaggerated that they verge on brutal slapstick - Monty Python in Brooklyn - Mr. Clay expresses homophobia straightforwardly. When he singled out an audience member as a ''fag'' for wearing a spotted shirt, the video screen briefly showed real fear on the man's face, as he perhapswondered what his neighbors might be incited to do.

Mr. Clay's persona, a kind of X-rated Archie Bunker, could be amusing in small doses. And he may intend a deep irony with it - who would want this angry, megalomaniacal moron to run the world? But as he lashes out against women, gays, the Japanese, or anyone else who would seem to stand in the way of his own gratification, his popularity shows that others identify with that anger, whether he intends to exorcise it or stoke it.

Mr. Clay may be toying with greater resentment than he bargained for. While his fans enjoy his frankness, that enjoyment doesn't necessarily carry over into affection for him. Before Mr. Clay's routine, a rapper and the director of the concert film tried to get the audience to chant ''Clay'' for two minutes; the ''Dice'' chant quickly petered out and was replaced by an obscene one. And when Mr. Clay moved into his finale, playing drums with a rock band and singing his would-be autobiographical anthem, ''Brooklyn Bad Boy,'' large numbers of people headed for the exits. Once Mr. Clay was done with his naughty words, they had no use for him.